Angie Abdou - This One Wild Life: A Mother-Daughter Wilderness Memoir

My girl never needed me. Thats what Ive always said.

This one came out of the womb ready for her first year of college, Id joke. She arrived all fair skin and red hair, detached and regal, self-contained, like an entirely different species than her two-year-old brother, a case study in need.

As a baby, Ollie consumed me. Youre too responsive, people told me. Let him cry it out. You have to put him down. Youre spoiling him. I read the experts and studied my boys cries, straining to decode the meaning of each whine and wail. Was it short or long? Sharp or dull? Urgent or passive? Did it mean hunger? fatigue? discomfort? illness? Please. Just tell me: Ill fix it.

But every cry seemed to mean one thing: Pick me up, pick me up, pick me up.

And never, ever put me down.

My girl made no such demands, and I accepted her self-sufficiency with gratitude and relief. Even their very births were fundamentally different. Ollie came to us via C-section, like a parcel in the mail. He wasnt there for weeks after his due date, he still wasnt there and suddenly he was there. His arrival seemed as simple as a nurse putting up a sheet, a masked man appearing on the other side, and voila: baby. My husband, Marty, didnt do well with the rapid transition. The doctor held up our new infant and announced in a booming voice: ITS... A...

The doctor intended for Marty to examine the evidence on display and finish the sentence. Perhaps the doctor always did this: presented the father with the honor of revealing the tiny infants sex to the new mother. Marty later told me that in the stress of the moment, in those very first seconds as a father, the only thing that came to his mind was... Scrotum? Its a scrotum?

The silence stretched until the doctor felt compelled to rescue Marty. A BOY! Its a boy.

Our daughters birth allowed us time to brace ourselves for the before-and-after chasm that accompanies the arrival of a whole new human being. After a night of strenuous labor, my husband and I had transitioned to a world where we had two children. The new baby, a punctual and well-behaved creature from the beginning, burst onto the scene at exactly seven a.m. on her due date. When the doctor commanded me to push, I took up the challenge with intense focus, forgetting to breathe at all toward the end. A long-distance swimmer with decades of underwater-swimming practice, I could hold my breath for a very long time. The healthcare team whisked my oxygen-deprived newborn off to an incubator for a couple of days recovery, but not before I got to see her.

She had nothing to do with the names we had picked out. All our zippy Zadie and Zoe options evaporated in the face of this calm queen-like creature. Marty and I fretted over names for two days before settling on the classic Katherine Elizabeth. Because Elizabeth came from my grandma, we threw in Martys grandmas name too: Katherine Elizabeth Jean. A big name for a little baby.

One thing I should tell you, Ang.

Uh-oh. Yes?

You remember Katherine?

Of course I remembered Katherine, Martys ex-girlfriend, the one he was dating when he and I first met, first got drunk and had sex on someones lawn at training camp in Fort Lauderdale, first fell in love. Yes, I remember Katherine.

Her middle name is Elizabeth. Katherine. Elizabeth. He stressed each name as if in my post-partum bliss, I might miss the connection. His girlfriend. Our daughter.

Despite the possibility that Martys ex would think we named our child after her, Katherine Elizabeth Jean stuck. Ive never met a Katherine I didnt like.

Already in those earliest days of Katherine Elizabeth Jeans existence, I could feel the fluid and fast details of life hardening into narrative: my euphoric insistence that I loved giving birth and wanted six babies; the South African doctor assuring Marty that of course a forty-year-old woman, mother of a newborn and a toddler, didnt really want six more babies (They all get a little crazy after the birth. Take her home. Shell settle down.); the stranger walking the hospital halls with a tiny, dark-haired creature tucked into his chest and his shoulder (This is the best part of life, he told Marty. Our fourth, and still: the very best part.). Before Id even left the hospital, Id already begun repeating stories, committing them to memory, weighting them with significance.